Correcton: Oracle ships Java 7 RC

Due to a reporting error, the name of Oracle chief Java architect Mark Reinhold was misspelled in the story, "Oracle ships Java 7 RC," which posted to the newswire Thursday. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth and 10th paragraphs of the story have been corrected on the wire and now read, in order:

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Due to a reporting error, the name of Oracle chief Java architect Mark Reinhold was misspelled in the story, "Oracle ships Java 7 RC," which posted to the newswire Thursday. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth and 10th paragraphs of the story have been corrected on the wire and now read, in order:

"We all know for various business and political reasons that this release has taken some time," said Oracle chief Java architect Mark Reinhold in a webcast Thursday, referring to Oracle's 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems, which then controlled Java.

In a blog item posted Wednesday, Reinhold announced that a pre-release build of the JDK (Java Development Kit) 7, build 147, is the first, and maybe the only pre-release Release Candidate for the programming language and associated runtime environment.

The new release is more evolutionary than revolutionary, Reinhold said. "There are some significant improvements though nothing really earth-shattering," he said.

One feature that Reinhold extolled is an improved I/O interface for working with file systems. The JSR-203 file API (application programming interface) specification supplants the java.io.file package.

Another area of improvement is the way Java can be used by multicore processors, thanks to the inclusion of the Fork/Join framework, JSR 166. "Fork/Join is one of many ways to deal with expressing parallel computations that will scale well to arbitrary numbers of processor cores," Reinhold said.